Original link: http://news.deviantart.com/article/63997/
The Lamb of God, The Lamb of Art: and what truly matters
by Stefan Chirila – [link] – 
Everyone knows about the “Lamb of God”. Well when you do photography and you become, I was going to say good, but you don’t necesarily have to be good for it, I mean look at me haha, when you become a photographer, you become the “lamb of art”.
The Lamb of Art?
When you do photography you start to understand photography. it looses the awe factor, the magic that used to make you go “wow how can that be possible, did it really look like that?”. you create art, the very thing that is the stuff that awe is inspired by, that people look up to, that people enjoy, but you can only do that by understanding photography and how it works and what makes it tick and what makes it awe inspiring. this way it loses it’s glamour. when you realize what exactly makes something look shiny, you realize the components of that arent always necesarily shiny in the first place
Like my friend Dan said, “Analyzing a joke is like disecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog usually dies from it. ”
To you, as an ‘all-knowing’ creator of art, the things that to people seem glamorous in your photography, aren’t much more than a “oh, I used that technique, or that one”. When people say “wow that is just about the perfect capture”, you might say, “well, yeah, if you capture the face between the top and middle third of the image, you usually get a good composition”. Although in a way, I am sure you can easily notice, that this fact of life is not a particularly cheerful one, to come to the point where glamour is not glamorous to you any more when it comes to the pictures you edit, this phenomenon is not entirely of a bad nature and not entirely to be avoided.
Some people say that in order to gain experience one has to put up with the pain that comes with it; or, knowledge requires suffering; or, if you happen to disagree with the two previous versions, you might be able to relate to this one, namely, most everyone craves understanding, knowing, figuring out how the world works, and most of the ones who manage it, gain pain out of comprehending the evil in the world; hence many say “ignorance is bliss”.
So how on earth would such a fact of life be good? Well, in spite of the pain that comes with such knowldge, only the ones with knowldge can teach, and in spite of the pain that comes with experience, only the experienced can give good advice. So here’s the good part, in spite of the loss of much if not all the glamour behind the art-form that you practice, once you become a knowdgeable artist, you also suddenly find yourself in the position of being able to teach, share advice, and perhaps one of the most satisfying of them, the position of being able to create art that posesses the glamour that once you looked up to and were amazed by and which gives people the good feeling that art gives(for lack of a better wording), which makes art likable.
Lamb of God vs. Lamb of Art
As these things came to mind, I couldn’t help but make an analogy between being an artist (who creates …art that is) and God, who is much more than, but nevertheless also an artist, who creates, more than that, but nevertheless also art.
I’ll make it short and hopefully easily understandable. We as people, those who accept the idea of God as creator of the world and the fact that we walk among various creations of his, walk amazed and dazzled by the perfection of it all, by how things somehow work together to form this mystical whole that just stays together well enough to not fall apart, which in itself is awe-inspiring. We wonder how on earth this can be and our mind leads us to thoughts like “miraculous” or “magic” or “supernatural”. We, people looking at God’s work, are like viewers walking through an art museum where artwork is put on show. While God, as the creator of the world is the artist.
Looking at the situation from the artist’s point of view, things suddenly become more interesting. As artists, creators of art, we are suddenly thrown, so to say, by fate, into this unusual position in which, all of a sudden, we have the oportunity, to better, relate with God, than most people get to.
Relating with God
We suddenly realize how similar in nature the artwork that we create is to God’s artwork. They both dazzle the viewer, and they both have an author that understands them inside-out and who sees through their little details. It’s understanding these details that I find to be one of the most interesting aspects of everything that I talked about in this note here with a long introduction.
Let us remember what hapens to a person once they become an artist, or better yet let us use the wording, a creator of art. In a nutshell, they lose their sense of awe towards their artwork because, knowing the tiny details behind it, makes them look at it as a trivial thing. For example, looking at this image here [link] 
. Without being too self-advertising, let us analyze this photo. What are some things that would be awe inspiring. Ok this makes me sound selfish and stuck up which is not what I mean to say though this; what makes this image special or remarcable in any way?
• the fact that the sky is blue, and not over-exposed, like it should be on a day with lighting such as that day (but I guess some may not notice this one unless they had some experience with photography)
• the more obvious one is the fact that there are more than one of the person, in fact there are five (5), which is quite un-natural and could not happen naturally unless… no it could not happen.
• and of course, but you would not be able to tell this unless I told you, which I will now, I shot this image and I am also the person in it
Now, I, as the person who put this picture together, I know that in order for me to be both the person shooting the picture and the person in it, I have to use the timer function in the camera. Ok this was not rocket science. Moving on, in order for there to be five of me in the image, I know I can shoot the same image 5 times, with me standing in 5 spots and then erasing everything but me in 4 of them, leaving the vegetation intact in only one picture in order to have a background. As for the sky, there are various ways of fixing an overexposed sky, I chose to copy the properly exposed sky from another picture and place it instead of the overexposed ugly white blob of a sky that this picture initially had. Here’s a giveaway, if you look at the outline of the treetops that touch the sky, you might notice how in some places there are traces of while. I should have paid more attention I guess.
Now if I were to say these to someone who never edited a picture or never heard about how a picture gets edited they might say “wow, thats impressive”, but for a person who does that a lot, this ability slowly becomes something they take for granted and the simple ability to apply these tricks is not the stuff of awe and wonder for me, the way it used to before, when I first learned these techniques and all I would want to do is find a way to implement them in every picture I get my hands on for editing (ok this statement is exagerated 
). What matters for me now, once the use of these techniques became trivial, is to be able to find a message to convey in the image, or an image with exceptional composition (which after all this time I find to be what is truly the stuff that skilled photographer’s pictures are made of) that can make the use of these techniques worthwhile. The same way, I could say, salt and pepper are great spices, but they are no good all on their own.
Alright, now what does that have to do with God?
God is the artist who came up with a lot of interesting effects and techniques to enrich His artwork. Examples are, the stars in the sky, which the Bible speaks of as the statement of God’s glory, or the beauty of sunny day that fills a person’s heart with joy. Another example could be the bittersweetness of rainy day, with the blue tones and slightly underexposed look to it, if we are to speak in photography lingo. Some of the most amazing of things that God came up with however is living being. Indeed every animal, bird, fish, human, that walk the earth is something to marvel at and to inspire awe in everyone who is willing to look close enough. Plants too. They have abilities like the to adapt to environments, predators (yes plants too. Like the ones that secrete substances that attract the natural enemies of the predators that attack them). But see, after comming up with all these ideas and all these ingenious technilogy, God started to see them as a given, something that he provided his creation with and therefore to Him is not as awe inspiring as He would like his creation to be. So like any good artist, God too, is constantly on the search for the element of awe in his artwork. For me, the element of awe in a picture with colours that I edited well, could be the excellent composition, or the luck of being in the right spot at the right time catching the right look of a person. For God, the element of awe is choice.
Choice: the element of awe
Talking about God giving mankind choice sounds so cliche, but the reason why everyone talks about it and has been since God unveiled to us that He gave us choice, is because of the awe inspiring content of that fact. The point is that nothing is unexpected for God. He created every bush, every tree, every water that flows down a river. He can make people tall, short, strong, fat, beautiful, ugly, smart or dumb. This is why God isn’t impressed by someone ability to be witty or by someone’s physical strength or weakness for that matter. See as much as God is not impressed if a strong man threatens Him, he is also angry if a weak man cries on sake of his weakness, for God knows that not only did he equip people with strength or weakness but he also reserved (for Himself alone) the ability to change those properties and give additional strength to those He choses to, which is really what the phrase in which God says that there is nothing a man can not achieve when working with Him really means. Thus the fact of the matter is that since all of our abilities are God given, none of them are really of true value, or awe-inspiring as I defined the term awe-inspiring earlier on; none except for the choices we make, as to what we do with the things we are given by God. For when God said He gave us choice, he does not mean that He gave it to us like he gave us strength or height or weight, He means He gave us choice in the sense that choice is the one thing that He leaves to us, that although He could get involved in it since He is omnipotent, He chooses not to, in order to give our actions value, or the element of awe; in a predefined world, to let us be the element of decision.
Conclusion and Explanation
So in order to end things properly I shall explain the title. I chose to name this note “The Lamb of God, The lamb of art: and what truly matters” because I wanted to express what in my opinion is a good analogy between creating art as a human and God creating His creation and especially the things that in creating art are universally of greatest value. The part regarding the idea of ‘the lamb’ refers to the biblical image of sacrifice. By it, I meant to express the sacrifice that takes place in the artist’s mind as he metamorphoses from regular person into an artist: the seeing art as awe inspiring gets sacrificed, and replaced by the sense of knowledge and understanding. It is to be noted that people’s seeing things as awe inspiring is often necessary for an artist to convey his message. For sometimes when a mind is halfway along the way of fully understanding the value of art, the mind might underestimate it, for something without of awe entirely, when there really is great value to it, hard for the untrained eye to see, which needs to be shown through awe inspiring elements even if they themselves are not the truly valuable element. An good example for this is in the animated film ‘The Last Unicorn'(~1985) where a witch caught a unicorn and put it in a cage for passer-bys to see. They however could not see the horn, thus they did not know it apart from a horse. For that reason she put a spell on the beast giving it a fake horn, which however was visible to the people. Sometimes a metaphor needs to be added to a thing of valour in order for people to see it as valuable.
Maybe the ultimate example of how sometimes things of valour are not clear to people unless one does something special to make it visible to them is what God did through the Christ. God did something very very special for mankind, in His heart. He decided that he would bless humanity with forgiveness instead of vengence. This is a thing of such tremendous valour and greatness that it is comparable to the existence of drinking water on earth. However, just telling mankind, “Well, I decided to be enormously gracious and in spite of you not deserving it, I forgive you!” just wouldn’t cut it. Come on, you gotta admit, it doesn’t sound or look too epic at all unless one studies the context and looks behind the words.
Of course God knew that. So, he took this thing of valour and made it visible to mankind. He came in the shape of Jesus Christ, the man with God’s spirit within Him. He walked among us, healing us, giving the blind men sight by touching their eyes, the deaf men hearing by touching their ears and He made the lame walk by commanding them to stand up. But really these were just the prelude to what He truly came to achieve. He came to heal, to give sight to the blind, but what He really needed to do was not to touch our eyes in order to see, but our hearts, because our hearts are what that which was not able to see. Through the fact that we saw with our eyes the torture He went through, and heard with our ears His pleading on the cross, sent out on our behalf, he made it clear to us that what He is doing is something epic, and finally our eyes were able to interpret the epicness of the events to their full potential. Jesus’ life was, or perhaps in a better wording, can be seen as, the special “visual component” (remember back to using special techniques in photography to give a well composed picture the final touch), if this was photography, that God used in order to reveal, by making it visually undeniably clear, that the abstract decision that He made, of His offering us forgiveness, was a statement of perhaps humanly ungraspable awe. His forgiveness was the object of valour, but only through His comming to us, He made visible to us. Thus, the title of this note is, “The Lamb of God, the lamb of art and what truly matters”.
I wanted to start things off this way so that those who feel offended can close the window now and now feel pushed into reading something they have no interest in. Other than that I shall jump right into the topic. Throughout my 4 year and a half (up to this day) long photographic career I have continuously heard people talk about the importance of one’s outlook on photography. From the beginning I asked myself the big question “so what is the way I have to look at photography in order for my pictures to look good?”.
. But let me humour you and try to explain why I think this scenario is far from being unlikely.
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